This book seeks to explain what is plainly evident to most students and even casual observers of Congress. In the House of Representatives, the majority rules – with the minority seldom granted a substantive chance to influence the making of national policy. In the Senate, it is the minority that quite often calls the shots – with the filibuster empowering a minority to frustrate the designs of the majority. Such differences are said to reflect competing values of the American political system: our national institutions are designed to protect both the power of the majority to act with dispatch and the power of minorities to temper the excesses of the majority. On that logic, it is not surprising that the two legislative chambers differ so radically in their central tendencies.

But that is not the way the two chambers started out in 1789. The rules of the two chambers in fact were nearly identical at the start: House majorities were not expressly favored over the minority and Senate minorities were not expressly favored over the majority. Members of the early Congresses, however, were not content to leave untouched the rules chosen for them by the first House and Senate. Indeed, political scrambles over the set of rules governing each chamber began soon after opposing sides began to scuffle over policy for the nascent country. Perhaps not surprisingly, those two fights – over policy and over procedure – often became intertwined.